In a mobile communication environment, transmission of early media or a pre-call notification is a method of playing an audio message and obtaining certain inputs from a calling party during the process of setting up a voice call with a called party, before completing the voice call, so that the calling party can hear an audio message and provide inputs, for example, dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signaling inputs, before the called party answers the voice call and before the calling party starts paying for the voice call, or even if the called party does not answer the voice call and the calling party does not pay for the voice call. The period between start of ringing and answering of the voice call is the period when an early media path is established between the calling party and the called party.
As mobile networks and mobile devices have evolved, text based communication and visual based communication have become an integral part of the telecommunication domain. Mobile devices have screens that display text and graphics and run applications, and mobile networks provide various data services, for example, a short message service (SMS), an unstructured supplementary service data (USSD) service, a multimedia messaging service (MMS), other data services, etc., to send and receive text and other visual information between the mobile networks and the mobile devices.
There are many voice calling systems in which a voice call made by a calling party cannot be completed with the called party answering the voice call. Such unanswered calls are also referred to as missed calls or incomplete calls. Many of these missed calls remain incomplete with the calling party having no option to complete the voice call. Some call complete solutions offer the calling party and the called party alternative methods for completing the voice calls. These call complete solutions include, for example, voice short message service (SMS) solutions and voicemail solutions that allow the calling party to record and send a voice message to the called party, and missed call solutions that send a missed call alert SMS message to the called party with the hope that the called party will make a new voice call to the calling party.
For some of the call complete solutions described above, for example, the voice SMS solutions, an audio message such as “Called party is out of coverage area” is played as early media to the calling party informing the calling party of the reason for the voice call not being completed. The early media is played before the voice call is answered and before the start of voice call billing to the calling party. Therefore, the calling party can listen to the audio message without being billed for the voice call. In some cases, the audio message played as early media also informs the calling party of the options available to complete the voice call, and instructs the calling party to take necessary actions to complete the voice call.
Furthermore, early media, for example, in the form of color ring back tones (CRBT), also referred to as caller ring back tones or caller tunes, allows the called party to customize what the calling party hears during a call attempt. Instead of a familiar ring back tone, the calling party hears the customized ring back tone message or other personalized audio content selected by the called party while the calling party waits for the voice call to be answered.
Conventionally, early media helps handle call establishment or helps provide additional information to the calling party before the call is answered. However, there are times when the calling party is not paying full attention to the audio message being played before the call is answered. This is more so with mobile devices having screens and visual displays, where the calling party is looking for visual cues indicating that an outgoing voice call has been answered or not, before paying full attention to the voice call with the aim of engaging in a voice communication with the called party. Furthermore, even when the calling party is paying full attention to the audio message being played, the calling party may be in a noisy environment, which makes it difficult to understand the audio message.
Furthermore, certain types of interactions are not possible or are cumbersome with a single mode of early media. For example, early media in the form of a color ring back tone (CRBT) that plays an audio prompt requesting a calling party to press a key to subscribe to the color ring back tone that the calling party is about to hear, detracts from the calling party's experience. A less intrusive early media message in more than one mode is therefore required. Therefore, there is a need for expanding the early media from an audio interaction, to a combination of audio, text, and visual interaction, to enhance the calling party's experience during the early media phase of a voice call, while preserving the unpaid nature of communication prior to an established voice call. To reinforce the power of the early media message being communicated to the calling party, there is a need for adding a visual mode component or a multimode component to a typical audio mode component to make the early media into multi-modal early media.
Furthermore, conventional call complete solutions require the calling party to spend about 5 seconds to about 20 seconds listening to an audio early media message to understand the status and to hear instructions on how to complete the voice call. There is a need for speeding up the interaction by providing the same or more information using multi-modal early media to the calling party in a few seconds, what would otherwise have taken 20 seconds.
Hence, there is a need for a method and a system that transmit early media notifications of one or more of multiple communication services, for example, enabling completion of an incomplete call attempt made to a called party by the calling party, providing call information to the calling party before the call is answered by the called party, etc., in more than one of multiple modes to a calling party device.